thoughts about change for a changing world

Pirate Bay Trial Reaches Guilty Verdict

Breaking news today is that the Pirate Bay, the world’s largest bittorent portal has been found guilty of ‘assisting making available copyrighted content’ after the more serious charge brought against them of ‘assisting copyright infringement’ had been thrown out by the judge on the second day of the trial. While the e International Federation of the Phonographic Industries and the Motion Picture Association of America,had been seeking over 100 million dollars in compensation from TPB, the award was $3.6 million. The PirateBay are set to appeal the verdict, and there is expected to be no disruption to the site, who are advertising a press conference at 1pm Swedish time today.

It is important to remeber among the media coverage of the trial which has rarely portrayed TPB in anything but a grossly negative light, that firstly the Pirate Bay does not host any copyrighted material whatsoever. It merely provides search results and links to material hosted by various users. Google of course does exactly the same thing. However it’s hard to see the IFPI and MPAA trying to sue Google for doing the same thing.

Furthermore while the MPAA and IFPI may wish that torrents as a technology were made illegal it has to be remembered that they provide a vast number of legitimate uses, as torrents decentralised system of sharing files meaning that LInux distributions, independent films (systems such as the Catbot project do this) and other large files which are free to download can be shared by a large community without the problem of bottlenecking downloads at a centralised server. Indeed the more popular a torrent the faster it can be shared by the community, making it a tremendously useful technology for creating a readily available creative commons.

The BBC’s rather poor coverage of the trial concluded today with a story and blog comment in which Darren Waters claims

The professional creative industries know too well that file-sharing copyright files without permission is not something they will ever completely eradicate.

Instead, they want to drive it to the margins of society – and to do that they have to educate the file-sharers and attempt to eradicate the abuse of file-sharing technologies.

However what exactly they seek to educate people about is totally unexplained. Perhaps they seek to educate file sharers as to how little money the poor record and film companies are making and how they are collectively on the verge of bankruptcy… Perhaps they seek to educate people that the cost of creating a digital copy of a dvd or cd is just a few pence, but will retail for somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds… Perhaps they seek to educate people that the notion that should be able to sample a product to see if they like it before making a purchase is enitrely unreasonable and that one must part with thir money to discover that a cd is rubbish.

Most people I know download music and films. If they like them they will often buy the album, go to see the band live, or go to watch the film in the cinema as it will be better quality and on a larger screen. However asking people to part with money without any knowledge of the product as happened in the old days is no longer a viable option, and no amount of ‘education’ from enormous corporations with multi-billion dollar annual turnovers will convince people otherwise.

The BBC finish their coverage of the trial with the statement that

The creative industries want ISPs to become the guardian of those gateways and take more responsibility over the way their customers use the internet.

Which essentially says that having failed in their attempts to ‘educate’ consumers that the outdated models which the MPAA and IFPI climg to are the best way to preserve corporate profits… i mean help struggling artists… They are now trying to get internet service providers to spy on their users and give these enormous corporations the details of any individual who shares stuff. So it turns out that they are fairly wise to the fact that education is not a viable option for them after all, but that trying going after individuals and trying to scare people into doing what they want is a better long term strategy to help the massively rich to stay massively rich.

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